Vulkan Officially Released - No Mac Support

IMHO this Vulcan announcement may or may not help but Metal and the number of quality triple A titles coming - especially from Feral these days is probably as good as we have ever seen.

The hardware situation remains uncertain due to the push for thin and long waits between revisions. The option of external GPUs may help overcome this to some degree.

Unknown is the effect of the 32-bit purge - will titles get patched or will work arounds appear? It may also kill off WINE on Macs which removes a way of getting access to many classics.

Both consoles have recent updates so should present a reasonably static target hardware level for game developers today so Macs that can offer this level of gaming performance should be OK for a while I would guess. Also the currency miners have put GPU upgrades out of reach for many average PC gamers so the rate of progress there may be slower until (or even if) this can be resolved.

So, gentlemen, given that Metal2 has been out for a bit and now there are Metal "backends", since I know next to nothing about programming, how would you rate the current state of (and future) of Mac gaming?

Is there more hope now?

Unchanged, as the current state of MoltenVK is not in a shape where AAA games will use it.

Anyway, the more interesting question would be if the so far very limited feature set supported by MoltenVK has been in any way extended to match the Windows/Linux Vulkan desktop feature set. From this change log, it doesn't really look that way.

And another thing: "…so far the likes of Feral Interactive and Aspyr have been quiet on whether they plan to use MoltenVK to ease their porting burden." That is wrong, though. Feral has made very clear that they won't use MoltenVK, as they have an existing and well-working Metal development pipeline.

"We do what we must, because we can."
"Gaming on a Mac is like women on the internet." — "Highly common and totally awesome?"

Anyway, the more interesting question would be if the so far very limited feature set supported by MoltenVK has been in any way extended to match the Windows/Linux Vulkan desktop feature set. From this change log, it doesn't really look that way.

And another thing: "…so far the likes of Feral Interactive and Aspyr have been quiet on whether they plan to use MoltenVK to ease their porting burden." That is wrong, though. Feral has made very clear that they won't use MoltenVK, as they have an existing and well-working Metal development pipeline.

Regarding the "…so far the likes of Feral Interactive and Aspyr have been quiet on whether they plan to use MoltenVK to ease their porting burden."
It's simply the fantasies of what's mainly a Linux site... As you said, Feral have been very clear about it.

Did a quick comparison today on Dota2. The moltenVK version is not faster than the openGL one at 1080p on my 5K iMac running Mojave.
At >4k (4096*something), it's ~25% faster than openGL
Vulkan/DX11 on Windows is ~55% faster than moltenVK at 1080p. Clearly, the translation layer comes at a CPU cost.
The openGL windows version appears bugged. Too bad, it would have been nice to compare to macOS openGL.